Original Title: 5 Years Post GameStop
Original Author: @vladtenev
Translated by: Peggy, BlockBeats
Editor’s Note:
The trading restrictions on GameStop ($GME) on January 28, 2021, remain one of the most controversial and symbolic moments in the U.S. capital markets. On that day, several brokerages, including Robinhood, suddenly halted the buying of multiple "meme stocks," including GME and AMC, while allowing sales, triggering a strong backlash from retail investors and quickly evolving into a public event about market fairness, financial infrastructure, and power structures. This was followed by congressional hearings, class-action lawsuits, and a long-term trust crisis surrounding Robinhood, Citadel Securities, and the market-making mechanism.
Five years later, on this sensitive date of January 28, 2026, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev chose to revisit the past and published a lengthy article to "clarify" the decisions made back then, which is clearly not a coincidence. On one hand, the $GME stock price saw a mild rebound and increased trading volume in mid to late January, reigniting the sentiment in the meme stock community; on the other hand, hashtags like #KenGriffinLied became popular again among GME/AMC holders, reviving the controversy accusing Griffin of perjury during his congressional testimony in 2021.
At the same time, Robinhood faced new criticism for some unrelated actions, such as announcing sponsorship of a NASCAR event on January 27, 2026, and offering 0% borrowing costs for shorting certain stocks (including GME), leading retail investors to criticize it for "once again siding with the shorts." The meme coin craze on platforms like Coinbase referenced the events of 2021, with tokens like $coinbase emerging, and mentions of similar tokens like "$Robinhood" or "$GME" on Solana.
In this context, Tenev's statement serves both as a memoir-style review and a highly strategic narrative reshaping. He refocused attention on technical institutional issues such as "clearinghouse margin requirements" and "T+2 settlement cycles," attempting to reframe the 2021 crisis from moral accusations of "manipulation and conspiracy" to a systemic issue of "outdated financial infrastructure failing under extreme volatility," and naturally leading to his proposed solutions of stock tokenization and real-time settlement.
When retail power, social media mobilization, and high-frequency, complex financial backend systems collide, who exactly is "pressing the pause button"? And this time, can the new infrastructure represented by blockchain and tokenization truly prevent another 2021? The market, regulators, and time will have to provide the answer together.
Here is the original text:
What happened? How can we ensure that this does not happen again?
Five years ago today, brokerages like Robinhood were forced to halt buying transactions for multiple meme stocks, with GameStop being the most representative. This event became one of the most bizarre and attention-grabbing market failure cases in modern stock market history.
The one-day trading halt was fundamentally due to a complex set of risk management rules from clearinghouses, originally designed to hedge against the risks posed by the U.S. stock T+2 (two days) settlement cycle. According to these rules, brokerages had to prepay large amounts of cash between the occurrence of meme stock trades and their final settlement to reduce systemic risk.
What happens when slow, outdated financial infrastructure meets unprecedented trading volumes and volatility in a few stocks? The result is: massive margin requirements, trading restrictions, and millions of angry users.
Retail investors wanting to buy GameStop were naturally furious. In their eyes, Robinhood went from "hero" to "villain" in an instant. At that time, I had just been in office as the sole CEO of Robinhood for less than a month and was facing the first major crisis of my career.
After our team worked tirelessly for 72 hours to address urgent issues and urgently raised over $3 billion to strengthen our capital, we finally had time to lift our heads and seriously review this crisis. I made a commitment at that time: I would not only do everything possible to enhance Robinhood's resilience in similar situations but also push for improvements in the entire market system to ensure that such events do not happen again.
We strongly advocated for real-time settlement in the U.S. stock market. This effort ultimately led to the reduction of the settlement cycle from T+2 to T+1—arguably the most substantive reform during SEC Chair Gensler's tenure (despite ongoing controversies).
However, in a world where news rolls 24/7 and market reactions are measured in "real-time," T+1 is still far from sufficient. Especially considering that trading on Fridays effectively means T+3, and long weekends can even mean T+4. Our pursuit of real-time settlement continues, but this path is exceptionally difficult in the traditional stock market—requiring coordination among too many entrenched interests burdened by historical baggage. It is clear that we need a completely new approach.
This is where tokenization comes into play.
Tokenization refers to converting assets like stocks into token forms existing on the blockchain. In addition to reducing costs, natively supporting fragmentation, and enabling 24/7 trading, more importantly: on-chain stocks can naturally enjoy the real-time settlement characteristics of blockchain.
The absence of long settlement cycles means a significant reduction in systemic risk, alleviating the pressure on clearinghouses and brokerages, allowing customers to trade freely at any time in the way they want.
We have already seen the feasibility of this model in practice. In Europe, Robinhood has launched over 2,000 tokens representing U.S. listed stocks. These tokens provide European investors with exposure to U.S. stocks and allow for dividends. In the coming months, we also plan to unlock 24/7 trading and DeFi access, enabling investors to self-custody stock tokens and explore more possibilities like lending and staking.
As the advantages become increasingly clear, I believe it is only a matter of time before the U.S. embraces this technology. In fact, progress is already being made: several major U.S. exchanges and clearinghouses have recently announced plans to advance stock tokenization.
But without a clear regulatory framework, these efforts are ultimately difficult to implement. Fortunately, we are entering a critical window. The current leadership of the SEC is embracing innovation and actively promoting experiments related to tokenization; at the same time, Congress is reviewing the important crypto legislation known as the CLARITY Act, which requires the SEC to continue advancing this technological path and to establish modern rules for tokenized stocks. The significance of legislation lies in ensuring that future SECs will not easily abandon or overturn the progress made today.
By collaborating with the SEC and leveraging the CLARITY Act to promote reasonable and feasible guidelines for U.S. stock tokenization, we can work together to ensure that trading restriction events like those in 2021 never have to happen again.
Let us seize this moment to fully unlock real-time settlement for retail investors.
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